kottke.org

Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products

This tiny e-ink reader is small enough to attach to...

This tiny e-ink reader is small enough to attach to the back of your phone.

The Headless Mary Magdalene by Artemisia Gentileschi

I’m charmed by this fragment of Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting of Mary Magdalene that’s up for auction later this month.

For many years it was in a private collection in Germany where it lay rolled up in a cellar. The head of the saint had been cut out of the canvas, under circumstances that remain unclear, in an incident most probably linked to the chaos and looting of postwar Berlin.

Like the empty picture frames at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the rectangular hole in the painting invites the viewer to imagine what became of its former contents. Where is Magdalene’s head & shoulders now? Did it get framed as its own painting? Is it still hanging in someone’s house or tucked away in someone’s attic? Will it be reunited with the rest of the painting someday?

Btw, this painting is a copy of another of Gentileschi’s previous works, which hangs in the Pitti Palace in Florence. There are some differences between the two paintings, but at least we know what the area inside that hole looks like, mostly.

Tags: art · Artemisia Gentileschi

Between the Impossible and the Inevitable: The Case for...

Between the Impossible and the Inevitable: The Case for Defiance (aka Never F**king Surrender). “We make the future in the present, when we show up. Don’t surrender it to those who would destroy it.”

Hostile Volume is a simple and maddening game where you...

Hostile Volume is a simple and maddening game where you need to hold the audio volume at 25%, which gets increasingly difficult with each level.

Slashdot

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Amazon May Sell Trainium AI Chips To Third Parties In Shot At Nvidia

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company may eventually sell its Trainium AI chips directly to outside customers, not just through AWS, which would put Amazon in more direct competition with Nvidia. "There's so much demand for our chips that it's quite possible we'll sell racks of them to third parties in the future," Jassy wrote in his annual shareholder letter Thursday. He also revealed the company's chip business is already running at more than $20 billion annually, with demand so strong that current and even future generations are largely spoken for. Quartz reports: Access to Amazon's chips is currently limited to Amazon Web Services, with customers paying for cloud-based usage rather than owning any physical hardware. Selling to AWS and external customers alike, as standalone chipmakers do, would put annual revenue at around $50 billion, up from the $20 billion the company estimates for the year, Jassy said. The $20 billion figure spans three product lines: Trainium, the AI accelerator chip; Graviton, a general-purpose processor; and Nitro, a chip that helps run Amazon's EC2 server instances. All three are growing at triple-digit rates year over year, Jassy claimed in his letter.

Jassy said demand for Trainium has outpaced supply at each generation. Trainium2 is essentially unavailable, with its entire allocated capacity spoken for. Trainium3 started reaching customers in early 2026, and reservations have filled nearly all available supply. Even Trainium4 -- which is not expected to reach wide release for another year and a half -- has substantial pre-orders committed. Jassy argued that a full-scale Trainium rollout could shave tens of billions off annual capital costs while meaningfully widening profit margin.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI To Limit New Model Release On Cybersecurity Fears

OpenAI is reportedly preparing a new cybersecurity product for a small group of partners, out of concern that a broader rollout could wreak havoc if it were released more widely. If that move sounds familiar, it's because Anthropic took a similar limited-release approach with its Mythos model and Project Glasswing initiative. Axios reports: OpenAI introduced its "Trusted Access for Cyber" pilot program in February after rolling out GPT-5.3-Codex, the company's most cyber-capable reasoning model. Organizations in the invite-only program are given access to "even more cyber capable or permissive models to accelerate legitimate defensive work," according to a blog post. At the time, OpenAI committed $10 million in API credits to participants. [...]

Restricting the rollout of a new frontier model makes "more sense" if companies are concerned about models' ability to write new exploits -- rather than about their ability to find bugs in the first place, Stanislav Fort, CEO of security firm Aisle, told Axios. Staggering the release of new AI models looks a lot like how cybersecurity vendors currently handle the disclosure of security flaws in software, Lee added. "It's the same debate we've had for decades around responsible vulnerability disclosure," Lee said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hacker Steals 10 Petabytes of Data From China's Tianjin Supercomputer Center

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A hacker has allegedly stolen a massive trove of sensitive data -- including highly classified defense documents and missile schematics -- from a state-run Chinese supercomputer in what could potentially constitute the largest known heist of data from China. The dataset, which allegedly contains more than 10 petabytes of sensitive information, is believed by experts to have been obtained from the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in Tianjin -- a centralized hub that provides infrastructure services for more than 6,000 clients across China, including advanced science and defense agencies.

Cyber experts who have spoken to the alleged hacker and reviewed samples of the stolen data they posted online say they appeared to gain entry to the massive computer with comparative ease and were able to siphon out huge amounts of data over the course of multiple months without being detected. An account calling itself FlamingChina posted a sample of the alleged dataset on an anonymous Telegram channel on February 6, claiming it contained "research across various fields including aerospace engineering, military research, bioinformatics, fusion simulation and more." The group alleges the information is linked to "top organizations" including the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, and the National University of Defense Technology.

Cyber security experts who have reviewed the data say the group is offering a limited preview of the alleged dataset, for thousands of dollars, with full access priced at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Payment was requested in cryptocurrency. CNN cannot verify the origins of the alleged dataset and the claims made by FlamingChina, but spoke with multiple experts whose initial assessment of the leak indicated it was genuine. The alleged sample data appeared to include documents marked "secret" in Chinese, along with technical files, animated simulations and renderings of defense equipment including bombs and missiles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Register

Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

Chatbots are great at manipulating people to buy stuff, Princeton boffins find

Urge restraints before AdLand does this without appropriate disclosures

Large language models can be very persuasive, and researchers say that's a problem when they’re used to create advertising.…

Value Motel

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Value Motel

Motion in Blue

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Motion in Blue

Found Kodachrome Slide -- The Bill Roof Collection

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Found Kodachrome Slide -- The Bill Roof Collection

date stamped on slide, March 1966

Oakland

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Oakland

Shimonada, Ehime Prefecture, Japan 下灘、愛媛県

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影) posted a photo:

Shimonada, Ehime Prefecture, Japan 下灘、愛媛県

Behance Featured Projects

The latest projects featured on the Behance

Industrial World


Illustrating the industrial world of Elkem: a series focused on the group's applications and facilities.

fumi*23 has added a photo to the pool:

桜

sakura

Wel.nl

Minder lezen, Meer weten.

Van Gerwen klopt Bunting na achterstand en bereikt finale

BRIGHTON (ANP) - Darter Michael van Gerwen heeft in de tiende speelronde van de Premier League de finale bereikt. De Nederlander knokte zich in de halve finale in Brighton tegen de Engelsman Stephen Bunting terug van een achterstand van 4-2 en won met 6-5.

In de kwartfinale had Van Gerwen zijn landgenoot Gian van Veen verslagen. Jonny Clayton is in de finale de opponent van Van Gerwen. De Welshman rekende af met de Noord-Ier Josh Rock: 6-4.

Koploper Luke Littler verloor in de kwartfinale met 6-4 van Bunting.


Advocaten Diddy: rechter maakte fout bij strafbepaling

NEW YORK (ANP/RTR) - Het advocatenteam van Sean 'Diddy' Combs heeft donderdag een verzoek ingediend om de rapper onmiddellijk vrij te laten. Volgens hen heeft rechter Arun Subramanian een fout gemaakt toen hij de rapper in juli veroordeelde tot een gevangenisstraf van vier jaar en twee maanden.

De rechter had volgens de advocaten in de strafbepaling niet moeten meewegen dat Combs de slachtoffers met geweld en bedreiging zou hebben gedwongen om mee te doen aan zijn seksfeesten, omdat hij daarvan was vrijgesproken door de jury.

Combs werd in juli schuldig bevonden aan het vervoeren van mensen met prostitutie als doel. Volgens de aanklacht was Combs ook schuldig aan onder meer mensenhandel, omdat hij zijn vriendinnen, zangeres Cassie Ventura en een anonieme vrouw, zou hebben gedwongen mee te doen aan zijn seksfeesten. De jury sprak Combs echter vrij van mensenhandel. Daarom mocht de rechter volgens Combs' advocaten de beschuldigingen van dwang niet meenemen in zijn strafbepaling.


this isn't happiness.

ART, PHOTOGRAPHY, DESIGN & DISAPPOINTMENT INSTAGRAM ★ ELSEWHERES

The moonlight ain’t so great, Ivan Marchuk







The moonlight ain’t so great, Ivan Marchuk

Weekend plans, Austin Leong





Weekend plans, Austin Leong

MetaFilter

The past 24 hours of MetaFilter

My mispronunciation of Al Kaline will haunt me for as long as I live

A deep dive into the network of MLB home runs and the history of baseball.